Cablevision sued over disruption in service caused by Sandy

A couple of New Yorkers are not happy about how their cable provider handled the outages resulting from Hurricane Sandy, and they’re taking it to court.

Yesterday, father and son Irwin and Jeffrey Bard filed suit against Cablevision Systems Corp., claiming the cable provider failed to offer rebates to more than 1 million of its subscribers who lost TV, Internet and phone service after Sandy ripped through the area. The class action suit seeks $250 million in damages.

According to the suit, Cablevision failed to meet its contractual obligations of offering credits to any customer who lost service for more than 24 hours. The suit claims that instead, the company only offered the credits to its “most favored” customers and only after those customers asked for them.

A spokesman for Cablevision says the suit is meritless and misstates the facts. “Blanket or arbitrary credits for cable outages could shortchange customers," Charlie Schueler told Reuters. "Each case is different and our policy covers the entire period of time when Cablevision service was out, including when the service interruption was caused by the loss of electrical power."

According to the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Hunter Shkolnik, the $250 million the suit seeks covers the duration of the outage, the number of people affected and the services lost.

For more InsideCounsel coverage of Hurricane Sandy and other natural disasters, see: